A chess visualization exercise

This visualization exercise is linked to this tactics post, but that’s as much of a clue as I’ll give!

Click through the game below, consider the position after 24…h6 (even better if you set up the position on a real board) and maybe warm up with visualization exercises.

Now think about forcing moves, being checks, captures and threats. Pick your top 3 candidate moves and explore them, but only in your mind’s eye. It may help to write down your variations at first, but don’t move the pieces for at least 20 minutes.

Once you are satisfied that you have explored each candidate move to the point where you have discarded all bar one, and you can visualize the continuation to the end, then compare your thoughts and/or notes with the solution.

Unless you had the perfect solution, then assess where you went wrong. Did you miss a forcing move, miss an opponent reply, forgot that a piece was on a different square, not ‘see’ that certain squares were covered or not? If you know where you need to improve, then you know what to focus on next time.